Arcane Topics in Economics and Philosophy, Interspersed with Various Distractions

April 22, 2007

Alasdair MacIntyre on Tradition

Tradition is a subject that has long interested me, so when Val and I got in a debate about it in the comment thread of a recent post ("The Cartesian Gambit": I was taking the side of Cartesian rationalism this time, with Val on the traditionalist side, though in the past I have undertaken the defense of tradition), and I realized how little I understood the issue, I decided to take a look at one of my favorite philosophers, Alasdair MacIntyre, in particular Chapter 15 of After Virtue, entitled "The Virtues, the Unity of a Life and the Concept of a Tradition." I realized as I began to read that this was not the first time. I had come back to this chapter before, in hopes of illuminating the same question, what is tradition? Apparently it hadn't enlightened me the first time, since I was still in the dark. But no harm tryin again.

MacIntyre starts by problematizing the theory of action, in passages that, among other virtues, are very funny:

A course of human events is then seen as a complex sequence of individual actions, and a natural question is: How do we individuate human actions? Now there are contexts in which such notions are at home. In the recipes of a cookery book for instance actions are individuated in just the way that some analytical philosophers have supposed to be possible of all actions. 'Take six eggs. Then break them into a bowl. Add flour, salt, sugar, etc.' But the point about such sequences is that each element in them is intelligible as an action only as a-possible-element-in-a-sequence. Moreover even such a sequence requires a context to be intelligible. If in the middle of my lecture on Kant's ethics I suddenly broke six eggs into a bowl and added flour and sugar, proceeding all the while with my Kantian exegesis, I have not, simply in virtue of the fact that I was following a sequence prescribed by Fanny Farmer, performed an intelligible action. (After Virtue, p. 209)

I love philosophy! But the joke has a point:

To this it might be retorted that I certainly performed an action or a set of actions, if not an intelligible action. But to this I want to reply that the concept of an intelligible action is a more fundamental than the concept of an action as such. Unintelligible actions are failed candidates for the status of intelligible action; and to lump unintelligible actions and intelligible actions together in a single class of actions and then to characterize actions in terms of what items of both sets have in common is to make the mistake of ignoring this. [my emphasis]

One more illustrative joke*:

I am standing waiting for a bus and the young man standing to me suddenly says: 'The name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus histrionicus.' There is no problem as to the meaning of the sentence he uttered: the problem is, how to answer the question, what was he doing in uttering it? Suppose he just uttered such sentences at random intervals; this would be one possible form of madness. We would render his action of utterance intelligible if one of the following turned out to be true. He has mistaken me for someone who yesterday had approached him in the library and asked: 'Do you by any chance know the Latin name of the common wild duck?' Or he has just come from a session with his psychotherapist who has urged him to break down his shyness by talking to strangers. Or he is a Soviet spy waiting at a prearranged rendez-vous and uttering the ill-chosen code sentence which will identify him to his contact...(p. 210)

The lesson that MacIntyre draws from this is that life has an inescapably narrative character, that if we want to characterize it at all we can only characterize it as stories within stories. Later he arrives at this:

A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters -- roles into which we have been drafted -- and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. (After Virtue, p. 216)

Very wise here. One reason for tradition is that it solves coordination problems. If that sounds trivial, it's not. If you take marriage, for example, two people have to make a commitment of tremendous life importance, and much misery can result if they don't understand that commitment in the same way. A similar dynamic applies to relations between brothers and sisters, friends, employers and employees, authors and readers, etc. And it is reinforced by this haunting detail:

When someone complains -- as do some of those who attempt or commit suicide -- that his or her life is meaningless, he or she is often and perhaps characteristically complaining that the narrative of their life has become unintelligible to them, that it lacks any point, any movement towards a climax or a telos. Hence the point of doing any one thing rather than another at crucial junctures in their lives seems to such persons to have been lost. (After Virtue, p. 217)

But when the time comes for MacIntyre to articulate the content of that telos, he becomes strangely vacuous:

It is now possible to return to the question from which this enquiry into the nature of human action and identity started: In what does the unity of a human life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask, 'What is the good life for me?' is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion. to ask 'What is the good for man?' is to ask what all answers to the former question must have in common. (p. 219)

... which questions lead to the chapter's anticlimax...

We have then arrived at a provisional conclusion about the good life for man: the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man...

That can't be right! MacIntyre doesn't seem to be aware that the statement is a sort of paradox. Or rather, it is like a set of Russian matryushka dolls, with each doll representing the question "What is the good life for man?" But what is the good life for man? MacIntyre never gives a more specific answer, but he does tell us this:

I am never able to seek for the good or exercise the virtues only qua individual... What the good life is for a fifth-century Athenian general will not be the same as what it was for a medieval nun or a seventeenth-century farmer. But it is not just that different individuals live in different social circumstances; it is also that we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone's son or daughter, someone else's cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession, I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation. Hence what is good for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. (After Virtue, p. 220)

There is wisdom in this. But it is of course too abstract to be of much practical help, for better or worse. One must mediate it through one's own understanding of what one's inherited obligations are. Also, it seems to contain a troubling tendency towards relativism. Suppose a fifth-century Athenian general was praised for razing enemy cities to the ground and massacring the inhabitants. Is it wrong to judge him by the standards of our times, and condemning his cruelty? Would MacIntyre say that that was the good life for him, even if it would not be for us? Should we seek, then, merely to be praised rather than blamed in the eyes of those around us?

Finally, MacIntyre arrives at the "concept of a tradition." Interestingly, he sees himself as an opponent of Burke:

What I am, therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself part of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of a tradition... What constitutes such traditions?

We are apt to be misled here by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characteristically such theorists have followed Burke in constrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate. For all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradition; this is as true of modern physics as of medieval logic...

Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is already dead...

A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition. (p. 221-222)

The matryushka dolls again. After Virtue is an excellent book, most famous for its demolition of post-Enlightenment ethical theory in the first nine chapters. But here the argument seems to collapse in self-defeating circularity. Ethics requires telos, but the only telos MacIntyre can offer is to look for a telos. In any case, I can't glean much insight from this about the epistemology of tradition, which is perhaps not surprising since this is a book about ethics. Maybe I was barking up the wrong tree. How depressing.

* I am perhaps doing MacIntyre no favors by labeling passages as jokes which he introduces with serious intentions, and any humorous aspect is superfluous to his main object. Readers who do not find them funny may blame my eccentric sense of humor and not MacIntyre.

Comments

An epistemology of tradition? For social traditions, that could be tough. But for individual families, it seems to me like most traditions are born out of habit or in honor of some important event in the history of the family. For instance, there's a tradition in my wife's family of always giving the first-born daughter the middle name of Louise. Certainly, there's no practical or logical reason for the tradition, and I seriously doubt that in this case the tradition is smarter than I am. Another tradition on my wife's side is to have a family reunion every 4th of July on Orcas island. That sort of tradition makes sense, and the date makes sense since it's a national holiday, but I don't think that people in other families could necessarily benefit from the same tradition. Perhaps these examples don't really qualify as traditions anyway, maybe they're just mere habits. What would it take for a habit to qualify as a tradition? I brush my teeth everyday (with rare exceptions), does that qualify as a tradition? Supposing the majority of Americans brush their teeth nearly everyday, would that be considered a tradition? How long would a society's members have to brush their teeth everyday for in order for the distinction to graduate from habit to tradition? And once the brushing of teeth becomes tradition, is it then somehow wrong to break from tradition by not brushing teeth when nano teeth-cleaning robots are introduced into the water supply? A more historical example is the eating of pork. Pork historically has been difficult to keep clean from disease and bacteria compared with other meats, and thus it made sense to traditionally avoid pork. But in modern times, we don't really have to worry about pork spoiling any more than other meats, and so the avoidance of pork seems less rational. Is tradition smarter than modern man in this case? I think it's pretty clear that it's not. What other traditions do we have? Everyone wears clothes, and the bible explains the reason is because Adam and Eve started to feel shame due to original sin, but surely that's not the only reason (and it most likely was not even the original reason). Clothes are a personal shelter from the elements, so it's not difficult at all to explain why we wear them. Why we wear them indoors is another question all together, and shame perhaps features prominently there. After the wearing of clothes, I'm not sure I could come up with full-fledged traditions in American society. Maybe it's traditional to start driving a car around the age of 16, or it's traditional to get shit-faced drunk on your 21st birthday. It's traditional to celebrate holidays and buy presents. There are certain courting rituals that are semi-traditional, like the man buying the woman's meal at dinner, or the man buying the woman some flowers or something. Certain common courtesies could be considered traditional, such as the holding open of doors, but a lot of these courtesies are changing all the time, so they might just be habits at this point. It really is tough to say what could be considered traditional nowadays. In the past, there were certain ways to do things, you harvested at certain times, you prepared food a certain way, there was certain lore that you tried to obey in order to effect a certain outcome. But nowadays science has taken the place of most tradition (and superstition), and if someone ever wants to know when to harvest, all they have to do is look at the relevant research done on the topic. There's no need to sacrifice a goat anymore to try to produce rain, we can just use our simple chaos theoretical algorithms to predict a chance of it raining, or even better we could just irrigate and make the chance of rain mostly irrelevant. In a way, you could say that one of the grandest American traditions is the application of the scientific method, and the grandest American tradition is most likely Democracy in action.

MacIntyre had been on my shelf for several years. After seeing this post, I read chapter 15 and I think there is a solution to the paradox Nathaniel detects and finds unsatisfying. A couple of things MacIntyre says seem to me to hold the key to resolving the problem:

“It is always both the case that there are constraints on how the story can continue and that within those constraints there are indefinitely many ways that it can continue” (p. 216)

“It is clear the medieval conception of a quest is not at all that of a search for something already adequately characterized, as miners search for gold or geologists for oil. It is in the course of the quest and only through encountering and coping with the various particular harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which provide any quest with its episodes and incidents that the goal of the quest is finally to be understood. A quest is always an education both as to the character of that which is sought and in self-knowledge” (p. 219).

Now to repeat the passage Nathaniel finds unsatisfactory:

“We have then arrived at a provisional conclusion about the good life for man: the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man...”

In theological terms, God is the telos, the definition of the good life for man. The object of humanity is to become like God: “Be ye therefore perfect as I or your father in heaven is perfect.” But no human being or group of human beings fully comprehends this telos. And since we cannot fully know our true good, MacIntyre arrives at a provisional conclusion about the good life for man—which is to seek to know/obtain the good life for man, in other words, to draw progressively closer to our true telos. Since he is writing philosophy, not theology, MacIntyre doesn’t name the final good (although his Aristotelian frame makes it quite clear what it is, i.e., the Unmoved Mover, God).

As the second passage quoted above indicates, life educates both individuals and traditions. What individuals can learn is shaped by the tradition into which they are born, but not fully shaped. Some follow one path, some another of the infinite story lines that are available within any tradition. Traditions likewise change on different paths. And people observe outcomes that grow out of the choices made both by individuals and by larger civilizational traditions. Some individual and civilzational paths end in what everyone recognizes to be failure, others in what everyone recognizes as the good. Often the failure is patent because the person or collective do not attain the good ends they had in mind in following the path but rather ends that from the beginning, they would have recognized as bad. In a church lesson manual I taught out of yesterday, Spencer W. Kimball recounts briefly the lives of two men he had known, one grounded in self-seeking egotism, the other in self-sacrificing service. At the end of his life, the selfish man was alienated from his family, considered a bore and boor by his neighbors, and generally isolated and bitter. The other man was beloved by family and friends and honored by the community. Both would have chosen the end of the second man but only one lived the life that led to that end. At the civilizational level, both China and Russia have come to recognize that communism did not lead to the envisioned end of universal egalitarian prosperity and liberty but rather to relative poverty and oppression, so both traditions have abandoned it and others around the world have learned that the promises of Marxism are false.

While the account MacIntyre is giving holds out the promise of closer and closer approximation to the true telos of humanity over the course of a life or of the life of a civilization, given our incomplete knowledge and frequent lack of wisdom, there are bound to be many detours on this path, many cases where individuals and civilizations are seduced by temptations and distractions (as the Russians and Chinese were, and as the whole of modernity may have been in important respects). But being capable of learning and persistently drawn by our true telos, there is hope (and some evidence) that humanity is learning from its experiences and unfolding new traditions and paths within traditions that bring us closer, over time, to our true end.

Mostly for good (but sometimes for ill), children are born into a tradition and involuntarily drink of its wisdom and foolishness. As humanity learns and encodes its learning within its tradition, the starting place of child can improve. And the wiser child can become the wiser man with newly emergent depths of understanding about the true ends of man. Thus, the good life of man is to [wisely, observantly] seek the good life of man, with an imperfect understanding and an uncertain sense of direction, but an ability to recognize good outcomes and to discover emergent dimensions of the good that become available as elements of the good become coded within traditions and no longer have to be learned by individuals but can be taken a the starting point in their quest for the good life for man.

I really like this MacIntyre, It is true that ethics is a matter of discovering that it is proper to do, and to know what is proper to do you have to have a context, you have to know what is your role to play in the story of your life.

However, what he does not address, atleast in this little I have read" is what about the postmodernist who rejects all narratives, or rather attempts to deny that any narrative is superior to any other narrative.

And there is a close kin to this postmodern view,which I find myslf apart of. The anarchist/iconoclast, who doesn't want to play any roles, he doesn't want to be part of a story that predates him, he wants to write his own narrative, to be author of his own life. He rejects his role as son, brother, nephew, citizen, patriot, guild member, etc. He wants to do define himself, not to be defined by others. He also does not want to be defined by his opposition to popular narratives,nor does he want to be defined by adherence to unpopular narratives such as subcultures and counter-cultures.

How is such a "FREE MAN" to act, With the total rejection of all narrative contexts, what can be his teleos, what factors define his actions. May he build his own narrative from an ecletric mixture of other narratives, no that would be like writing a story by cutting up other stories and pasting them together. Shall he simply switch from one narrative to another like a vagabond without a home, no then he is not the author of his own being, he is an obsessive reader, a critique with no talent of his own.

These are the difficulties that await the path of the Thelemite, which is to say those of us who aspire to the art of magick, which is the art of becoming author of one's own narrative.

We are entering an era in which the old narratives are breaking down. It seems that the motto of magick is becomning the motto for all. "Do what thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

This phrase to me is a prophesy that soon, the "LAW" which is to say narrative context will drop out from under us and DO what Thou Wilt, is all that will remain.

This is why the practice of magick is important, it is the art of learning to survive without narrative support from others.